Church Jeffrey - Kant, Liberalism, and the Meaning of Life

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For Sabine

Liberalism in practice in the United States and Europe has been largely elite-driven, technocratic, and friendly to free markets, yet its cosmopolitan, impersonal, bureaucratic governance has caused an acute feeling of disempowerment on the part of citizens. The neoliberal turn in many Western countries steadily evacuated moral language from politics, seeking to make it more pragmatic and materialistic, but attenuating the sense of communal purpose that holds all societies together. The ever-expanding inequality of wealth exacerbated the mistrust many populists have had with such elites who pretend to care for the welfare of all. Even though Western countries are now wealthier than ever, liberal governments nevertheless have become increasingly out of touch with the middle class and its moral needs for meaning, purpose, and belonging.

These worries about the anomie and alienation of liberal politics are not new, of course. Many scholars have diagnosed these ills long before the current moment. In 1996, for example, Michael Sandel argued that procedural liberalism, in bracketing morality and religion too completely, soon generates its own disenchantment. Where political discourse lacks moral resonance, the yearning for a public life of larger meaning finds undesirable expression. The Christian Coalition and similar groups seek to clothe the naked public square with narrow, intolerant moralisms. Fundamentalists rush in where liberals fear to tread (2005, 28). Sandels communitarian liberalism precisely aims to combat the atomizing tendency in contemporary liberalism.

More recently, as these scholars have predicted, left and right forms of populism have come to fill the meaning deficit left by liberalism and provided a sense of purpose for their adherents. On the right, the populist supporters of Donald Trump were animated by economic dislocation and cultural and racial resentment. The free market principles of the Republican Party increasingly appeared distant from the concerns of the white working class, benefitting only elites in business. Ronald Reagans liberalism has appeared less and less meaningful to this group. Instead, they became enthralled with Trumps populism, which sought to make America great again and uphold a form of conservative nationalism. This populism aimed to put America and (certain) Americans first, by, for example, ending free trade policies and severely restricting immigration. Trumps unexpected rise and unexpected continued appeal among Republicans points toward the sense of meaning and purpose that his illiberal exclusionary, pugilistic politics offered, that individuals could find meaning by contributing to the restoration of an authentic collective identity. Indeed, the dark inspiration of Trumpism was on full display on January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol building, in part due to Trumps relentless populist challenge to the rule of law in the wake of his loss in the 2020 presidential election.

At the same time, a populist reaction has emerged from the left as well. In 2016 and 2020, Bernie Sanders came very close to winning the Democratic nomination for President on a left-populist economic egalitarian platform. Sanders channeled the discontent of progressives who have held that the Democratic partys neoliberalism has failed to advance the causes of social and economic justice. Democratic elitesBill Clinton and Barack Obamajust like Republican elitesthe Bushesinstead protected the status quo and hampered grassroots activism. At the same time, the rise of identity politics has given individuals on the left another source of meaning and purpose. The persistence of inequality among historically marginalized groups casts doubt on the efficacy of neoliberal principles and practices to achieve genuine equality, and calls instead for grassroots marches, as well as efforts to topple symbols of racial or sexual hierarchy. At times, however, this identity politics has veered into illiberal activity, such as certain efforts to limit or even constrain freedom of expression, which has led to some individuals even to lose their jobs if they make an argument that unsettles progressive convictions.

The populisms of the left and the right pose a formidable challenge to liberalism in practice. Populism outcompetes liberalism by offering a sense of meaning and purpose for individual lives that liberalism fails to provide. Both forms of populism envision an urgent purpose that is conceived of as having fundamental value, and both confer on individual members the sense that each person can make a meaningful contribution to this common purpose. Liberalism in practice does not project a common purpose with fundamental moral value, and it conceives of individuals as subjects rather than agents, fungible rather than significant. Moreover, this populist challenge seems unlikely to be a temporary phenomenon. The polarization and sorting of American politics and culture have gradually increased with few efforts to reinforce a steadily disappearing center. Liberalism, it seems, stands in need of some rethinking and reformulating at a fundamental level. The task of political philosophy is to perform this radical thinking, to assess different models of liberalism to determine which is best simply and which is best for our time, or most practicable.

In this book, I use as my foil the most prominent and influential approach to liberalism in contemporary political philosophy, Kantian liberalism. John Rawls remains the most famous philosopher of neo-Kantian liberalism, even despite the cottage industry of critiques of his theory of justice and of political liberalism. Rawls liberalism is Kantian primarily in its formal, deontological character, or what argued that liberal societies, faced with the fact of reasonable pluralism of different views of the good life, should remain neutral with regard to disagreements about the good, and instead should focus on establishing the rules of justice that can command a widespread overlapping consensus among diverse worldviews. Liberal justice would thereby allow for private freedom in which individuals could pursue their distinct visions of the good.

Unfortunately, the neo-Kantian approach to liberalism seems unsuited to the challenges facing contemporary liberalism. Rawlsian liberalism was appropriate a generation ago, when Western societies were beset by conflicts between secular and religious views of the good life, and it could counsel bracketing these disagreements while converging on a shared conception of justice that could hold society together. However, today, liberal societies find themselves divided equally on views of justice as about the good, as illiberal populisms on the left and the right gain ever more adherents to their accounts of justice, hollowing out that overlapping consensus. It might be an interesting philosophical exercise to devise a theory of justice affirmed by ideal rational agents, but if these agents bear little resemblance to agents actually existing in contemporary liberal societies, then the theory has little use. In its formalism, its abstraction from our understanding of what is meaningful in life, such a theory has difficulty motivating individuals to affirm and adhere to these rational norms. Liberalism, in other words, needs more substance, more meaning, more purpose, in order to compete with these disintegrating populisms and integrate individuals into a common whole with a shared end.